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Author: Alisa Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
This book fills a gap in the field of criminal justice and law and society. Unlike any other available undergraduate text, this book integrates legal cases and empirical research on social science questions confronted by the criminal courts. In other words, it examines how social science impacts criminal law and procedure. The book is organized around the criminal court process beginning with issues related to pretrial proceedings and ending with issues concerning sentencing. Specifically, the book provides an introduction to the history of social science used by the courts and the types of social science admitted as evidence in the courts. The chapters that follow provide seminal legal cases and empirical, social science research on a variety of topics ranging from pretrial publicity and racial profiling to Megan's Law and the death penalty. Smith introduces students to the "law in action" by demonstrating how social science influences the courts and the courts influence society. Moreover, students are given the opportunity to critically review court opinions and social science studies that test some of the assumptions relied on by the courts in rendering their decisions. Sociology of law, law and society, and criminal justice students will find this book interesting, raise questions about the influence of law on society and whether empirical research helps or hinders grounded judicial decision-making. The teacher's manual accompanying the book provides a wealth of information about Internet-based resources, student activities, and videos to encourage student discussion and identify relevant current events.
Author: Alisa Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book fills a gap in the field of criminal justice and law and society. Unlike any other available undergraduate text, this book integrates legal cases and empirical research on social science questions confronted by the criminal courts. In other words, it examines how social science impacts criminal law and procedure. The book is organized around the criminal court process beginning with issues related to pretrial proceedings and ending with issues concerning sentencing. Specifically, the book provides an introduction to the history of social science used by the courts and the types of social science admitted as evidence in the courts. The chapters that follow provide seminal legal cases and empirical, social science research on a variety of topics ranging from pretrial publicity and racial profiling to Megan's Law and the death penalty. Smith introduces students to the "law in action" by demonstrating how social science influences the courts and the courts influence society. Moreover, students are given the opportunity to critically review court opinions and social science studies that test some of the assumptions relied on by the courts in rendering their decisions. Sociology of law, law and society, and criminal justice students will find this book interesting, raise questions about the influence of law on society and whether empirical research helps or hinders grounded judicial decision-making. The teacher's manual accompanying the book provides a wealth of information about Internet-based resources, student activities, and videos to encourage student discussion and identify relevant current events.
Author: John Monahan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 728
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Book Description
The publication incorporates Dauber v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the United States Supreme Court's landmark decision on scientific evidence in addition to new Daubert-based cases cited throughout the book. The book offers an in-depth discussion of the growing use of survey methods to establish damages in mass tort cases. The authors have integrated the latest Web site addresses to aid in further social science and legal research. It includes selections from two handbooks: the Federal Judicial Center Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence and West's? Modern Scientific Evidence.
Author: Patricia Ewick
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610441915
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Social science has been an important influence on legal thought since the legal realists of the1930s began to argue that laws should be socially workable as well as legally valid. With the expansion of legal rights in the 1960s, the law and social science were bound together by an optimistic belief that legal interventions, if fully informed by social science, could become an effective instrument of social improvement. Legal justice, it was hoped, could translate directly into social justice. Though this optimism has receded in both disciplines, social science and the law have remained intimately connected. Social Science, Social Policy, and the Law maps out this new relationship, applying social science to particular legal issues and reflecting upon the role of social science in legal thought. Several case studies illustrate the way that the law is embedded within the tangled interests and incentives that drive the social world. One study examines the entrepreneurialism that has shaped our systems of punishment from the colonial practice of deportation to today's privatized jails. Another case shows how many of those who do not qualify for legal aid cannot afford an effective legal defense with the consequence that economic inequality leads to inequality before the law. Two other studies look at the mixed results of legal regulation: the failure of legal safeguards to stop NASA's fatal 1986 Challenger launch decision, and the complicated effects of regulations to curb conflicts of interest in law firms. These two cases demonstrate that the law's effectiveness can depend, not only on how it is drafted, but also on how well it harmonizes with pre-existing social norms and patterns of self-regulation. The contributors to this volume share the belief that social science can and should influence legal policymaking. Empirical research is necessary to offset anecdotal evidence and untested assertions. But research that is acceptable to the academy may not stand up in court, and, as a result, social science does not always get a sympathetic hearing from legal decision makers. The relationship between social science and the law will always be complex; this volume takes a lead in showing how it can nonetheless be productive.
Author: John Monahan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 634
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Book Description
Author: Joseph L. Gastwirth
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461212162
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454
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Book Description
Expert testimony relying on scientific and other specialized evidence has come under increased scrutiny by the legal system. A trilogy of recent U.S. Supreme Court cases has assigned judges the task of assessing the relevance and reliability of proposed expert testimony. In conjunction with the Federal judiciary, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has initiated a project to provide judges indicating a need with their own expert. This concern with the proper interpretation of scientific evidence, especially that of a probabilistic nature, has also occurred in England, Australia and in several European countries. Statistical Science in the Courtroom is a collection of articles written by statisticians and legal scholars who have been concerned with problems arising in the use of statistical evidence. A number of articles describe DNA evidence and the difficulties of properly calculating the probability that a random individual's profile would "match" that of the evidence as well as the proper way to intrepret the result. In addition to the technical issues, several authors tell about their experiences in court. A few have become disenchanted with their involvement and describe the events that led them to devote less time to this application. Other articles describe the role of statistical evidence in cases concerning discrimination against minorities, product liability, environmental regulation, the appropriateness and fairness of sentences and how being involved in legal statistics has raised interesting statistical problems requiring further research.
Author: Stanton Wheeler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781610448833
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 748
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Book Description
The notion of law as a social phenomenon would have surprised educators and scholars a century ago. For them, law was a science and the library was the ultimate source of all legal knowledge. Our contemporary willingness to see law in a social context--reflecting social relations, for example, or precipitating social changes--is a relatively recent development, spurred during the last quarter century by the work of a generation of scholars (mostly social scientists and law professors) who believe the perspectives of the social sciences are essential to a better understanding of the law. Law and the Social Sciences provides a unique and authoritative assessment of modern sociolegal research. Its impressive range and depth, the centrality of its concerns, and the stature of its contributors all attest to the vitality of the law-and-society movement and the importance of interdisciplinary work in this field. Each chapter is both an exposition of its author's point of view and a survey of the pertinent literature. In treating such topics as law and the economic order, legal systems of the world, the deterrence doctrine, and access to justice, the authors explore overlapping themes--the tension between public and private domains, between diffused and concentrated power, between the goals of uniformity and flexibility, between costs and benefits--that are significant to observers not only of our legal institutions but of other social systems as well.
Author: Wallace D. Loh
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610443675
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 811
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Book Description
"How to inform the judicial mind," Justice Frankfurter remarked during the school desegregation cases, "is one of the most complicated problems." Social research is a potential source of such information. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, with activist courts at the forefront of social reform, the field of law and social science came of age. But for all the recent activity and scholarship in this area, few books have attempted to create an intellectual framework, a systematic introduction to applied social-legal research. Social Research in the Judicial Process addresses this need for a broader picture. Designed for use by both law students and social science students, it constructs a conceptual bridge between social research (the realm of social facts) and judicial decision making (the realm of social values). Its unique casebook format weaves together judicial opinions, empirical studies, and original text. It is a process-oriented book that teaches skills and perspectives, cultivating an informed sensitivity to the use and misuse of psychology, social psychology, and sociology in apellate and trial adjudication. Among the social-legal topics explored are school desegregation, capital punishment, jury impartiality, and eyewitness identification. This casebook is remarkable for its scope, its accessibility, and the intelligence of its conceptual integration. It provides the kind of interdisciplinary teaching framework that should eventually help lawyers to make knowledgeable use of social research, and social scientists to conduct useful research within a legally sophisticated context.
Author: Rosemary J. Erickson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Judicial process
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The cultures of law and social science differ markedly as to the kinds of truth they pursue. Law is deductive, presenting its findings as certainties; social science is largely inductive, presenting its conclusions as subject to revision and contingency. Yet the legal community traditionally draws at will and unsystematically on the findings of social science, sometimes with unfortunate results. The authors of this study explore this issue by focusing on the manner in which the United States Supreme Court uses social science data in reaching its decisions. Concentrating on decisions involving the issues of abortion, sex discrimination, and sexual harassment, they show that the use of such data has increased over the last twenty years, but they also show that whether such data are used appears to hinge more on the liberal, conservative, or longheld positions of the judges and the types of cases involved, rather than on the objectivity or validity of the data. By offering insights into how data are used by the Supreme Court, the authors hope to show social scientists how to make their research more suitable for courtroom use and to show the legal community how such data can be used more effectively.
Author: Michael Freeman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429791968
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
First published in 1998, this volume contains essays from leading thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic on the relationship between law and science. Science plays an ever-increasing part in the development of legislation and the adjudication of cases. Its limitations and its value are explored in these essays which discuss issues of methodology and of evidence. Amongst areas covered are silicone breast implants, the rape trauma syndrome, the environment, inventions and Bayesianism.
Author: Julius Stone
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452910669
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Book Description
Law and the Social Sciences was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The author, a distinguished authority on law, provides an illuminating and challenging discussion of the social aspects of law and legal problems. As a background to some penetrating observations, he takes stock of the contributions and interrelations of the bodies of knowledge, from both the juristic and the social science side, which bear upon the study of law at the present time. He is concerned to show the respects in which jurisprudential ideas in this area have been stimulated and clarified by work in the social sciences, and, conversely, to draw attention to the need for the increased interest of social scientists in this area to take account of juristic insights, many of them of long standing. He points out some of the dangers, not limited to waste of effort, arising from "parochialism" on the part of either the lawyer or the social scientist. The final section is devoted to a study of the contributions, potentialities, and limits of behavioralist and computer techniques in understanding and operating the appellate judicial process. The book is based on a series of three lectures given by the author as the William S. Pattee Memorial Lectures sponsored by the University of Minnesota Law School.
